This unusually accessible account of recent Anglo-American philosophy focuses on how that philosophy has challenged deeply held notions of subjectivity, mind, and language. The book is designed on a broad canvas in which recent arguments are placed in a historical context (in particular they are related to medieval philosophy and German idealism). The author then explores such topics as mental content, moral realism, realism and antirealism, and the character of subjectivity. Much of the book is devoted to an investigation of (...) Donald Davidson's philosophy, and there is also a sustained critique of the position of Richard Rorty. A final chapter defends the realist position against objections from postmodern thought. As a rigorous and historically sensitive account of recent philosophy, this book should enjoy a wide readership among philosophers of many different persuasions, literary theorists, and social scientists who have been influenced by postmodern thought. (shrink)

Scientific and technological policy issues are not and should not be exempt from the norms of democratic governance. This article examines two major theories of democracy, analyzes their commonalities and differences, and derives criteria for evaluating various forms of public participation in policymaking. The author argues for a new category of participation, participatory analysis, that includes forms of participation that satisfy democratic criteria and emphasizes the importance of learning among participants. Different types of participatory analysis may be best suited to (...) different kinds of policy problems. (shrink)

The restructuration of municipalities which has been decided by the Belgian government, is not only a purely technical operatzon but rather, and in the first place, a social problem. The shape and duty-profile of a local authority should not, indeed, be attuned only to fast changing expectations as far as services are concerned, but to consultation and participation as well.Public administration research cannot keep aloof from this debate, but is considerably hampered by the institutional confusion and the insufficient explicitation of (...) the aims of the present reform. A starting-pointcan, however, be found in the mergers of municipalities that were realized in 1964 and in 1970/1971. In 67 of these municipalities an inquiry was held concerning the consequences of the merger, and moreover, in twotest-cases this inquiry grew to a full-scale systematic policy analysis.This research shows that, as a rule, the former municipalities are reasonably represented in the new entity's council, but it also reveals that few efforts are made to give this representation a broader impact along formal or informal participation-channels. Integration of employees has not caused insurmountable problems. However, in large sized municipalities, resulting from mergers, one could notice a drastic increase in municipal personnel, not only with regard to new duties and objectives but to traditional administrative and police duties as well. Such a phenomenon points to the far-reaching changes which a substantial scale-increase provokes in a municipality's structure and policy profile. A large municipality resulting from mergers is no langer a simple sum of component parts, but a completely new entity, wishing to catch up as fast as possible with comparable municipalities that passed through a progressive growth process. Therefore, scale-increase is not only a means of economizing or an intra-administrative matter, but rather a way of creating chances for further development or wealth and well-being. (shrink)

Slife and Reber issue a welcome challenge to "implicit biases" against the serious investigation of religious experience and phenomena in psychology. I agree with the main thrust of their article but express a few friendly reservations about their analysis and some concerns about how a productive dialogue between psychology and religion might best be pursued from this point forward. 2012 APA, all rights reserved).

Desenvolvo um método de prova por refutação para a Lógica Proposicional Clássica, que resgata ideias dos tablôs semânticos de Evert Beth. Primeiro apresento o método em forma conjuntista, depois o utilizo em forma tabular simplificada.

Formulações da validade dedutiva clássica costumam recorrer explicitamente a modalidades: por exemplo, um argumento é classicamente dedutivamente válido se, e somente se, necessariamente se as premissas forem verdadeiras, a conclusão também é verdadeira. Não é possível abolir completamente esse apelo ao discurso modal, porque a lógica clássica é o domínio das possibilidades. Não obstante, pode-se, por intermédio de uma semântica informacional, evitar que o usuário da lógica clássica tenha de manipular modalidades, ainda que elas estejam, de algum modo, imbricadas nos (...) infons – unidades mínimas de informação. A partir do trabalho pioneiro de Carnap e de Bar-Hillel, apresentarei duas semânticas informacionais: uma delas diretamente relacionada a mundos possíveis, e a outra relacionada aos duais de mundos possíveis. (shrink)

This article addresses the extent and ways in which gender inequality in the newspaper coverage of arts and culture has changed in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States, 1955-2005. Through a quantitative content analysis, we mapped all articles that appeared in two elite newspapers in each country in four sample years 1955, 1975, 1995, and 2005. First, despite increasing women’s employment in arts and culture and a quantitative feminization of journalism, elite newspaper coverage of women in arts and (...) culture has hardly changed, making up about 20-25 percent consistently over the last 50 years. Second, our results show surprisingly few cross-national differences in the amount of the newspaper coverage devoted to women in arts and culture. Third, although women are underrepresented in the coverage of all artistic genres, there is some evidence of horizontal sex segregation—particularly in architecture and modern dance and fashion —as well as vertical sex segregation—in that attention to women has increased in “highbrow” genres that have declined in status. Finally, as the status of an actor type increases from laymen to artistic directors, the proportion of women decreases in newspaper attention to arts and culture. (shrink)

In this article, I attempt to restore the philosophical significance of that nonformalizable, noniterable, “singular’ element of natural language that I call “style.” I begin by critically addressing the exclusion of such instances of natural language by both semantics‐oriented logical analysis and a restricted variation of structuralist linguistics. Despite the obvious advantages – with regard to style – of ”pragmatic“approaches to language, such pragmatism merely returns to rule‐determination in the guise of “normativity.” Although style by definition resists any kind of (...) rule‐determination – whether posed in terms of semantics or intersubjective regulations of speech‐acts – there can be no consideration of language that ignores the persistence of style in natural language. In terms of cognition, any discursive agent understands more than allowed by either semantics or speech‐act theory. I ascribe this element of excessive signification to the role of style. My principal thesis is twofold: (1) a hermeneutic approach (exemplified by Schleiermacher) to literature should reveal the heuristically decisive role played by style in philosophy; and, more radically still, (2) style, in fact, may be crucially determinative of philosophical discourse in general. I suggest that a closer scrutiny of the lesser‐known works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, conventionally regarded as having dreamt of a “philosophy without style,” may consolidate the restoration of style's philosophical import. (shrink)

Based on the results of [11] this paper delivers uniform algorithms for deciding whether a finitely axiomatizable tense logic has the finite model property, is complete with respect to Kripke semantics, is strongly complete with respect to Kripke semantics, is d-persistent, is r-persistent.It is also proved that a tense logic is strongly complete iff the corresponding variety of bimodal algebras is complex, and that a tense logic is d-persistent iff it is complete and its Kripke frames form a first order (...) definable class. From this we obtain many natural non-d-persistent tense logics whose corresponding varieties of bimodal algebras are complex. (shrink)

Yanchar, Slife, and their colleagues have described how mainstream psychology's notion of critical thinking has largely been conceived of as “scientific analytic reasoning” or “method-centered critical thinking.” We extend here their analysis and critique, arguing that some version of the one-sided instrumentalism and confusion about tacit values that characterize scientistic approaches to inquiry also color phenomenological, critical theoretical, and social constructionist viewpoints. We suggest that hermeneutic/dialogical conceptions of inquiry, including the idea of social theory as itself a form of ethically (...) motivated human practice, give a fuller account of critical thinking in the social disciplines. (shrink)

It is proved that all bimodal tense logics which contain the logic of the weak orderings and have unbounded depth do not have the interpolation property.

Somatic mutation plays a key role in transforming normal cells into cancerous cells. The analysis of cancer progression therefore requires the study of how point mutations and chromosomal mutations accumulate in cellular lineages. The spread of somatic mutations depends on the mutation rate, the number of cell divisions in the history of a cellular lineage, and the nature of competition between different cellular lineages. We consider how various aspects of tissue architecture and cellular competition affect the pace of mutation accumulation. (...) We also discuss the rise and fall of somatic mutation rates during cancer progression. BioEssays 26:291–299, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Die Publizistik hat erfolgreich ihre Auffassung durchgesetzt, dass „die Diskussion einer wie auch immer gearteten ‚Zeitschriftentheorie‘“ „wenig ergiebig“ sei, woraus sich auch der schmale, auf die Inhaltsanalyse beschränkte Werkzeugkasten der Zeitschriftenforschung erklärt (dazu historisch fundierte Ergänzungsvorschläge unter Abschnitt 9 und 10). Nach einer Einführung in die Zeitschrift Die Kreatur (Abschnitt 1) scheint es deshalb nötig, das theoretische Objekt – Voraussetzung jeglicher Forschungspraxis – ‚Zeitschriften‘ vorab in aller gebotenen Kürze (Abschnitt 2–4) historisch-systematisch zu skizzieren. Die Kreatur kann dann als eine der (...) Zeitschriften im Rahmen zeitgenössischer Format-Optionen (Abschnitt 5–8) in Netzwerken wie dem um Walter Benjamin situiert werden (Abschnitt 11–13). (shrink)

Errol Harris talks about a crypto-dialectic method that lies behind the geometrical disguise of Spinoza'sEthics.Spinoza's method, he argues, is not the linear formal deduction of traditional logic but a crypto-dialectical development of the structural implications of a systematic whole. Substance differentiates itself into infinite attributes and infinite modes. Each attribute is self-differentiated into a hierarchy of modes ranging from the most complex to the simplest. Harris calls this a dialectical scale or a crypto-dialectical development of the structural implications of a (...) systematic whole. The self-specification of the whole into attributes and modes provides the framework for a dialectical system. Spinoza's hypotheses are implications dialectically derived from his concept of substance, a concept of a whole which differentiates itself into infinite attributes and modes. Substance is not a hypothesis but is a postulate which s i absolutely certain. Everything follows from substance with dialectical necessity. Substance is the origin of all things and ideas. (shrink)

This article focuses on Manuel Castells's claim that the information age announces major changes in stratification and, accordingly, in social and political mobilization. His assertion that informational labour displaces generic labour in informational capitalism is examined in terms of its conceptual and historical accuracy, and questions are raised about the notion of meritocracy embedded in his depiction of informational labour. The idea that the network society is characterized by `a faceless collective capitalist' is also called into question by evidence of (...) the persistence of a propertied class. Finally, Castells's analysis of the emergence and significance of identitybased mobilizations is examined. (shrink)

The topic of homonymy, especially the variety of homonymy that has gone under the title, “focal meaning,” is of fundamental importance to large portions of Aristotle’s work-not to mention its central place in the ongoing controversies between Aristotle and Plato. It is quite astonishing, therefore, that the topic should have gone so long without a book-length treatment. And it is all the more gratifying that the new book on homonymy by Christopher Shields should be so comprehensive, and of such uniformly (...) high quality.’ Everyone who cares about Aristotle will be in his debt. Shields’s book falls into two parts. In the first, he is concerned to lay out the basic structure of Aristotle’s views about homonymy; in the second part, we are led through the various applications of the idea, to the analysis of friendship, for example, the homonymy of the body, the account of goodness and, not least, the homonymy of being. Shields’s book brings out well how the topic of homonymy weaves in and out of the fabric of Aristotle’s thinking in a variety of areas. I will resist the temptation to follow Shields through these various subject-matters, and instead take up essentially two topics. First, (I), the basic outline of Aristotle’s notion of homonymy, more or less independently of its different applications (here, I follow Shields’s example in the first half of his book). Thereafter, I discuss a single application: the homonymy of being (this is the subject of Shields’s last and longest chapter). Here, I will be interested (II) in how homonymy relates to the theory of the categories; and (III) in the application of homonymy to the analysis of substance in the Metaphysics. (shrink)